Portside

A new idea called the “information bottleneck” is helping to explain the puzzling success of today’s artificial-intelligence algorithms — and might also explain how human brains learn.

The selection of Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) as the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee was the clearest sign yet of how seriously House Democrats consider the possibility of a full-blown constitutional showdown with Trump.

Younger people consistently see human rights—racial, immigrant, gender, LGBT—as important and uncontroversial.

Cathy Glasson is the farthest left candidate in recent memory to mount a serious campaign for Iowa governor. She is betting on a coalition of service workers, many of them immigrants and people of color; members of manufacturing unions, many of them white and some of whom supported Trump; and young members of DSA.

Robert Reich: The Resistance Report. Occupy USA | Democracy Is Coming. The Public | Movie. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Graven Image.

A survey of the life, work and associations of the late New York Review of Books editor Elizabeth Hardwick, the transplanted Southerner who became a writer of note among the literary and political circles comprising the New York Intellectuals of the pre- and postwar period, she had a knack for illustrating what might have been called feminist themes by way of specific details of specific lives.